Chicks dig the …

… the cell phone ads?

With apologies to Nike, Mark McGwire, Tom Glavine and Greg Maddux.

But that’s the conclusion reached by UK-based electronics retailer Tesco, as reported by Silicon.com.

The story says that the company’s latest WAP-based banner ad campaign resulted in clickthroughs of 3-7 percent on a banner ad campaign promoting several products, including the DVD release of “Bee Movie.”

“Tesco said the user-base of the portal has a strong segment of female household budget owners with an average age of 36—a demographic it said is particularly valuable for fast-moving consumer goods such as toiletries and cleaning products,” the story stated.

It does not say whether there was any value associated with the ads, such as discounts or coupons.

For this to lead to a conclusion that women will go for cell ads more than men is a bit of a stretch. Frankly, I was surprised at these results. After all, men are seen to be a bit more gadget oriented, but my wife has really started getting into online couponing, so who knows?

The mobile ad revolution will be really take off when there is value associated with those ads, and perhaps this campaign had that. By value, I mean the customer gets a real or perceived value, such as a coupon or discount on their wireless bill for participating.

Maybe non-juiced skinny guys like me who can field and hit singles in softball still have a chance.

What’s for dinner – asked Dr. FF

In the Fight Club vein, just saw one of the most subversive (or depressingly mainstreaming of underground culture) things I’ve ever seen in a national ad – about a wireless company as well (even though I usually write about ads on cell phones, not about cell phones)…

Meat Loaf – who plays the pivotal character Robert Paulson in the movie previously referenced – does a cute at for AT&T’s Go prepaid phone, which I just saw watching the NCAA title game.

But the interesting thing is when the wife walks in with a leg of … who knows?

Anyone else think of Meat’s turn as Eddie in “Rocky Horror Picture Show?” And the great scene around the dinner table, when it is revealed that Meat Loaf is indeed on the menu?

Don’t know whether to be horrified or delighted by the reference.

WWTD? Throw the phone out the window at 35k feet?

Today’s seemingly unrelated superfluous pop culture reference: Saw Fight Club for the first time over the weekend.

Why is this tied in, you ask?

Taking cell phone usage into the great beyond, the European Union apparently is close to allowing cell phone usage during flights, once the plane hits 10,000 feet.

There has been some noise about this in the U.S., but the Federal Aviation Adminstration and the Federal Communications Commission keep saying that there is evidence that wireless phones interfere with airliner instruments.

Is this a step toward worldwide use of such devices with your seat back in the relaxed position? Me hopes not.

First, on the technology side – given that most of Europe is on the GSM standard, this makes sense. And I have no problem if someone were to use their device (especially 3G enabled) for Web browsing, e-mail, etc. But why not do it as other airlines have been trying: create one collection point for Wi-Fi in the cabin with 3G backhaul to the ground towers?

Has anyone been on a plane with such a set-up? There have been some trials and courting between the airlines, aircraft maker Boeing and its creation Connexion, a firm trying to creat such a service. If you wanted to talk, couldn’t you just fire up your Skype or other IP phone in the process?

Why? Because it leads me to …

Second, the social ramifications of this are huge. Imagine sitting on the red-eye cross country … next to Paris Hilton and her Sidekick. Or a businessman trying to close a deal, when all you want is to close your eyes for a few.

Sure there are these objects of my device lust that block noise and increase fidelity, but you get the idea. Just had an interesting conversation with my wife about cell etiquette – and how you shouldn’t leave your cell out on the table at a restaurant: it shows you think the call is more important than you.

But once you allow someone to turn on their phone/device for data, how are you going to regulate/police them from talking on it? If I can flip open my laptop and get a Wi-Fi signal, you better believe I’m going to fire up my IP phone and talk to someone if I need to.

All I know is that I wouldn’t want to sit next to me on an airplane were cell phones allowed to be used.

Now, for the reference to “Fight Club” (based on a 1996 novel by Chuck Palahniuk) … To a certain degree, Tyler Durden (the Brad Pitt character) was right: technology has led to a deevolution of other sorts, especially in our interactions with each other.

In his words: “Tell him the liberator who destroyed my property has realigned my perception. “

There are several scenes in airplanes, including a bit about replacing the instructions-in-case-of-an-emergency” card with something a bit more realistic, if fatalistic.

And two all-time classic quotes for those who travel:

“Now, a question of etiquette – as I pass, do I give you the ass or the crotch?”

“You wake up at Seatac, SFO, LAX. You wake up at O’Hare, Dallas-Fort Worth, BWI. Pacific, mountain, central. Lose an hour, gain an hour. This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time. You wake up at Air Harbor International. If you wake up at a different time, in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?”

My thoughts on the whole possible FAA/FCC ban isn’t that it interferes with on-board influences. It’s the same reason many devices that have no such properties are banned during takeoff – they interfere with hearing the instructions of the flight attendants. Which of course are to take the oxygen that Tyler from Fight Club says is just to make us high to accept our fate, and to put our heads between our legs – so we can kiss our derriere goodbye.

Allowing people, strike that, a person wanting to have one-sided conversations in a silver tube streaking along at 450 mph at 30,000 feet sounds a little desperate to me.

Now, I’ve gotta go – I’m smoking a turkey (on the grill of course).

OMG – *bux is a hottie!

Pondering a few things as I anxiously await the season premeire of “Battlestar Galactica” Friday night …

1)  Here is an interesting story about how mainstream advertising is staring to use text-ese to hit those teens to 20-somethings who have grown up with SMS. It strikes me as cute, but what about flipping it – how can you get the ads onto the text messages? Some companies have started with ideas such as using the unused portion of a text for a tag line, but it would have to be an opt-in solution.

2) Speaking of mobile ads, there was this from MediaPost Communications: A new report from our friends at Nielsen states that “twenty-three percent (58 million) of all U.S. mobile subscribers say they’ve been exposed to advertising on their phones in the past 30 days.  Half (51% or 28 million) of all data users who recall seeing mobile advertising in the previous 30 days say they responded to a mobile ad.” The post goes on to give different demographic breakdowns, and states that 10 percent of users feel ads on their phones are acceptable, an increasing number of mobile users appear to understand the value proposition of ad-supported mobile content, says the report.

I would be interested in what kind of ads were used. Anyone have a copy of the original report?

3) Here is a recounting of yet another failure/disappointment for a municipal Wi-Fi effort, this one in my old stomping grounds of Boston. Beantown’s city elders came up with a bit of a different plan and business model: using a non-profit shell and not relying on a commercial ISP like EarthLink: which last year all but got out of the Wi-Fi business.

It mirrors an effort by Philadelphia that also has been underwhelming. The biggest problem with such plans is that there isn’t enough demand to make it go, even for a non-profit charging 10 bucks a month. Wi-Fi is NOT designed to cover entire cities, and outside antennas/routers will have a hard time penetrating buildings – especially older walls like in Beacon Hill, etc.

Cincinnati played around with this as well, but pulled out last year because it had no money. And this post by Eric Stein on his blog sums up the situation pretty well – the demand for such services is low given the penetration by more traditional landline (DSL or cable) high-speed services. Cincinnati Bell, Time Warner and Insight all would be leery of getting into this business, because it would detract from a very high-margin business.

And nowhere in the Globe story does it mention the biggest boon for such services – emergency responders and city services. You can make it work if you offer a city such secure services, including water and parking meter reading, but the cities have to agree to pony up millions a year to keep the network subsidized – the so-called “anchor tenant” model. There has been some thinking that ads at log-on and sporadic pop-ups would also pay for it – hence wireless advertising – but again, not enough demand. I mean, the outside season in Boston is what, 3-4 months long?

Again, Wi-Fi is great for houses and even offices, but not city blocks. Wait five years and see where 3G cellular technology takes us.

BTW, here is a link to Battlestar’s mobile page, for those of you interested (for those on a cell phone WAP browser, it’s mobile.scifi.com/bsg. The normal stuff – wallpapers, a few videos, scaled down graphics.

Not quite the shape of things to come, but fans could get a kick out of it.

Here’s hoping the show’s creators don’t disappoint in the final season – it kinda ran off the rails at the end of last season with all the legal drama and turning weasel-face Baltar into a Christ figure.

Who am I? Why am I here?

Caught up in what appears to be another Microsoft-Apple-Google battle was this release – the guys behind Linux, the free open-source operating system, have created one for mobile phones.

It could be the fourth-party candidate to fit the bill needed in this industry – some kind of standardization to create platforms ALL developers can use. (Forgive the political reference here and above to Ross Perot’s running mate Adm. James Stockdale). I don’t necessarily ascribe to the free model, but certainly open source makes a lot of sense.

It could certainly help wireless content/advertising creators as well – one of the big holdbacks in expansion in this frontier has been the dizzying array of operating systems and technologies that marketers have to navigate.

But at the same time, don’t expect Microsoft to go down without a fight, as evidenced here . Microsoft wants to make its Mobile operating system more consumer friendly to take on Apple’s iPhone – go figure.

I won’t hide my bias for Microsoft’s Windows Mobile – I grew up in the last decade using it’s PDA-based predecessor PocketPC, which was great for filing stories in the field if you had a portable keyboard. But Gates & Co. are losing sight of what makes that system so great – it is really catered to the guy who already uses Microsoft Office as a desktop application. In short, a businessman’s phone.

But as more people turn to Web-based word processing and spreadsheets, that all could change – we’ll have to see.

And then there is Google’s Android system, which has gotten a lot more hype and support from device manufacturers such as Samsung. This could help Google’s world domination drive even further – especially since AdSense (its automated sponsored links/online ad program) is reportedly built in.

Let’s just hope that it gets easier one day – but for now, it will be even messier. 

Nokia gets it – let US design it

This floated across my nose awhile back, and I apologize for just getting to it.

But it turns out that Nokia gets it. The guys from the REAL great white north are allowing user input into what goes into and onto phones, and how they should operate.

Here is a quote lifted from the Web site NewsFactor Network:

 “The ability to include large numbers of users into the development cycle means you can have a much more collaborative approach to development and you can try ideas out, refine them and move forward — or fail fast and get out,” said Bob Iannucci, Nokia’s chief technology officer. “We want more wild ideas.”

The story also recounts the Forrester study on the future of the wireless Web and how it will grow, and how Nokia’s initiative could help shape how we use it.

“Forrester Research expects the number of mobile Internet users to triple over the next five years in Western Europe alone, to 125 million, while Nokia expects its double-digit margins on handsets to shrink.”

So they did the right thing (which is sooo rare nowadays) – they let US design it.

Can’t wait to see some of those ideas at work. My first suggestion – I would love to see what they could do with a Windows Mobile powered device. Try something other than Symbian as an OS, and see what else is out there.

What are your ideas? What would you like on a phone/mobile device?

Catching up

Some odds and ends as I surf the Web and jam to Prince’s “Kiss” on Pandora ….

• Here is a cool site that really lays out the issues and the players in wireless advertising. There are more than the players listed here, but they really get to the heart of the issue – getting people to accept ads on their phones. Interesting take on which industries would be good for it: “Dining and Restaurant Reservations, Theatre Ticket Reservations, Hotels and Motels in connection with Telematics.” I would add retail, and especially grocery stores (see my previous post). But overall, MobileInfo.com gets it right.
• Here is a report of yet another prediction of more ad spend on “non-traditional” media, including mobile. This one suggests that even with the current threat of economic downturn, we’re looking at a 20.2 percent jump to $88.2 billion this year. This includes segments such as casual gaming, etc., but mobile certainly will take a share of that.
• Why has no one really followed up on/copied the coolest of all the iPhone applications? Sure, wanna-be devices are coming out in droves, but for me, the visual voice mail was the true new killer app on that phone (the rest was all superior UI as well as the ability to have your iPod and phone in one device). I know that Alcatel-Lucent did the back-end stuff for AT&T to make it happen, but why is it not been launched on other devices/networks since? (For those of you without an iPhone, the service allows you to see who called, and just touch the entry to hear the message, just like an e-mail inbox. No dialing in for voice mail – it is shipped to the phone within minutes of the message being left).
• That being said – here is a quick endorsement for another service that comes close – CallWave. If you can get your phone configured (or if your provider lets you), it comes really close to the “virtual voicemail” that is advertised. And they are playing around with voice to text conversion that allows you to get a sense of the message. Not quite as good as SpinVox, which uses real people to get the accuracy rate up, but not as expensive either. CallWave has a nifty widget for a PC, and even allows you to screen the call after a few rings either on your PC or on your cell.  You also get transcribed text messages, and e-mails (with a full voice message attached). You can also transfer back and forth between different lines. HawaiiTel (the major telecom in Hawaii) offered this, calling it Call Choice.
• And off topic – got another  comic series worth delving into. It’s called Y: The Last Man and it chronicles Yorick Brown, the lone remaining male of any species on the planet after a mysterious plague kills all the Y chromosomes but leaves all the females. And no, it’s not a dream world for poor Mr. Brown.

So where does all that money go, anyway? A BIG PARTY on Verizon’s tab!

Someone at the FCC is buying at least one round this weekend.

I mean, $19.59 billion with a B? For nothing more than air? For the uninitiated, I am referring to the results of the latest FCC auction of spectrum, or the licensed radio wavelengths that are used for everything from television broadcasts to yup, you guessed it, your cell phone networks.

The block up for grabs this time had been labeled “the beachfront property of wireless spectrum,” because of its purported ability to carry lots and lots of data (read: ads and media, hint hint). It is the space currently and soon to be formerly occupied by standard TV broadcasts, which are switching to go all digital.

Actually, I could’ve titled this post “The rich get richer – by losing their shirts.” All that money came from primarly two sources – Verizon and AT&T, primarly the former.

Noticably absent was Google – which honestly was a surprise to me. But they helped drive the price up, apparently, and got some provisions for open access networks (the ability for any phone or service provider to work on a particular network).

Also, the video guys didn’t really jump in full-force: Cox and a partner of Dish Network got some, but not nationally like the two big boys.

But two questions remain:

1) Did VZ and AT&T overpay? Some say yes, some say it’s too soon to tell. Here is an excellent post by Susan Crawford about the particulars of both the auction and the context around it.

2) Will it make consumers life better, and will it make it easier for marketers to use cell phones to advertise? Yes and no. It will take a few years, but this spectrum will make our current DSL landline connections seem like dial-up. The mobile Internet will work on this. And no, marketers will still face the same reservations and objections from consumers about getting ads on their phones as they always did. Even a noted online marketing expert acknowledged as such in my previous post (there’s just something about a person’s relationship with their phone). It will make it easier to get the content there, but will it make it easier for a consumer to want it? That’s up to the marketer, not the technology or the spectrum.

As for the fate of all that loot, here is a missive from the Washington Post:

“The winnings from the auction will go to the U.S. Treasury and are earmarked for support for public safety and digital television transition initiatives.”

That kind of loot should get us all a personal bodyguard, me thinks. But there oughta be a share set aside for a kegger, anyway.

You like me, you really like me!

Hopefully, you get the Sally Field reference.

And here’s why: I attended a presentation by Pete Blackshaw of Nielsen Online yesterday (Friday, 3/21) and it was spot on. He was previewing his next book Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3,000: Running a Business in Today’s Consumer-Driven World (which can be preordered through Amazon).

As background, Pete is the guy who helped launch Planet Feedback, which was the first such Internet “buzz” marketing research firm – and it even predated blogs. That eventually was swallowed up by Nielsen Online, which has become the leader in the field.

Anyway, he is the one behind such terms as “consumer generated media.”

Couple of key points from his talk:

• “The Web is all about listening”: That’s his advice to companies and marketers, who think they can shout their message and have it heard. I agree entirely with Pete here – the Web has enabled discourse and conversation about EVERYTHING, but most companies are truly uncomfortable with what people might say about them, or too thin-skinned to take the heat.
• “In the age of consumer control, credibility is everything”: Getting back to the first point, of course. You can’t hope to completely control everything except your own behavior. He cited Patagonia and Wal-Mart as two examples of companies starting to get it. Another example is what came out this week thanks to the blogosphere. Turns out a guy with an Xbox 360 specially decorated and signed by the guys at Bungie who are behind the Halo series had it fry (as has mine). Despite Microsoft’s assurances, the company scrubbed all the decorations off. Apparently, Microsoft heard about it through the blogosphere and had the guy up to Seattle to meet with Bungie and gave him a bunch of other cool Halo swag. Again, you can only control your own credibility, and when you mess up, be ready to fix it.
• And his six drivers of brand credibility: Trust, Authenticity (used the Patagonia example here), Transparency, Affirmation, Listening (Starbucks actually is now actively elicting ideas from customers – got an e-mail the other day), and Responsiveness.

OK, now how does this play into what I write about? Well, given that many people are starting to use their cell phones to interact with each other over the Internet (mobile blogging, videoblogs, Twitter, Jott.com) it only makes sense. Cell users are only going to get more sophisticated about how they use their devices to give feedback and the like.

I even asked Pete what he thought about mobile advertising, especially since he cited a study saying that of all the advertisement sources, text messaging was listed last at less than 10 percent. He did say that it has to be “grounded in high levels of consumer permission. There is something about the phone when unwelcome messages come in.”

Agreed. But how to get people to give that permission? I think it is a combination of cool, relevant content and value-add premise, especially if you can hit the consumer when they are about to make that buying decision. 

So why the Sally Field Oscar speech quote? Pete cited my blog during his speech, saying I had really done well after being up for such a short period of time, and then afterward said my blog kicked butt.

Although maybe he was just being nice.

Could the PC eventually disappear?

Saw a piece this morning about a group of women from West Va. who pooled their money and won a $247 million jackpot in Powerball lottery.

Seems like a lot of money – but that’s chicken feed compared with what mobile search is going to generate, according to this new report from Juniper Research.

That’s $4.8 billion with a “B” in the next five years. All from people looking up stuff on their handsets.

The article also goes into how that money is going to be generated, and of most interest are the gradual reduction in the “walled garden” (which will be a combination of easier-to-use devices and the service providers losing control of what people want to do with their phones, novel concept I know). Also of note – the cost of data will be coming down or offered at a flat rate.

Not that phones are ever going to replace PCs, but as search is taking over as a major function of any computer, are we going to see a tipping point of PCs to phones over the next five years? Are people going to be willing to shell out $400-500 for a decent smartphone that can search, see flash pages, browse the Net, type e-mails or text msgs, and talk with their friends – and forego $1,000 for a laptop and another $25-30 a month for high-speed connections. Not to mention the added coming bonus of having that search linked to your location by your phone.

As I stated in a previous post (actually my first ever post), there is already anecdotal proof that this has happened in Asia, and especially Japan.

 Oh, and it doesn’t hurt that Google and Yahoo! are girding their loins to take on mobile. Just wait until Android (Google’s new mobile operating system) and its accompanying tie-in to AdSense really starts taking hold. 

 Addendum (added later in the day): Google is noticing the uptick as well.

“We have very much hit a watershed moment in terms of mobile Internet usage,” Matt Waddell, a product manager for Google Mobile, said in an interview with Reuters (run on the CNET Web site). “We are seeing that mobile Internet use is in fact accelerating.”